Walt Whitman

by Reynolds, David S. ;

  Few personae in literature are as flexible and adaptable as Whitman’s “I.” In “Song of Myself” alone he assumes scores of identities: He becomes by turns a fugitive slave, a bridegroom, a mutineer, a clock, and so on. He is proud of his role-playing ability: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person”; “I become any presence or truth of humanity here.”11 Whitman is ready to absorb himself at will into many identities, regardless of gender. “I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician,” he announces in “The Sleepers.”12 In “Grossing Brooklyn Ferry” he writes, “Live, old life! play the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, / Play the old role.”

  The emotional peaks of the early editions of Leaves of Grass seem to reflect the style of the actor he most admired, Junius Brutus Booth. Neither Booth nor Whitman was particularly demonstrative in private. But when performing—Booth on stage, Whitman in his poetry—both were volcanic. Whitman’s identification with emotionally charged characters leads him to near-melodramatic peaks. “O Christ! My fit is mastering me!”; “You laggards there on guard! look to your arms! / In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!”; “You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat; / Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.”13 Like the actor who shaped him, Whitman as poetic performer took passionate expression to new heights.

  Closely connected with acting was oratory, another source of Whitman’s passionate voice. In old age he declared: “It has always been one of my chosen delights, from earliest boyhood up, to follow the flights particularly of American oratory.”14 As was true with the theater, his tastes in oratory were eclectic. He once wrote that he was “born, as it were, with propensities, from my earliest years, to attend popular American speech-gatherings, conventions, nominations, camp-meetings, and the like.”15

  The period from the American Revolution through the Civil War has been called the Golden Age of Oratory. The lyceum movement, which had begun in 1826 and crested in the 1850s, coordinated the appearances of lecturers in the arts, sciences, religion, philosophy, and literature. An article in Whitman’s Brooklyn Daily Times identified the years 1853–55 as the time when “The lecture system reached its culminating point.… Then it was a perfect furor. Lectures almost usurped the place of theatres and other amusements of the kind.”16

  Whitman admired America’s successful orators, whose techniques are felt in his poetry. What some have called the oratorical style of his poetry refers particularly to his “grand,” rolling lines with their rhythmic repetitions and vocal inflections. There was a grandeur about serious orators like the Whig statesman Daniel Webster and the Boston lecturer Edward Everett, two he particularly admired.

  Among his other favorites were the fiery antislavery politician Cassius Clay and the Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Clay brought a Junius Booth-like volatility to the lecture platform. Perfecting the participatory style, Clay walked back and forth as he spoke, gesticulating and emoting. Beecher regaled his huge audiences at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church with entertaining sermons that freely combined the divine and the secular—a mixture also visible in Whitman’s poems, which shift quickly between the spiritual and the earthly. Beecher regularly used the first person and addressed his hearers as “you” to create a personal connection with them.

  Whitman shared the interest in the new oratorical style based on audience-performer interaction. If Beecher told his hearers he was studying “you,” Whitman expressed a similar eagerness to develop what he called an “animated ego-style” of oratory with “direct addressing to you.”17 If Beecher wanted his hearers to surge all around him, Whitman wrote poetry of unexampled intimacy, telling his readers:

  Come closer to me,

  Push close my lovers and take the best I possess, […]

  I was chilled with the cold type and cylinder and wet paper between us.

  I pass so poorly with paper and types…. I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls.18

  Given the high visibility of orators on the American scene, it is understandable that Whitman, who loved to test out popular fads, would try his hand at oratory. His instinct to lecture predated his instinct to write. He told Horace Traubel, “When I was much younger, way back: in the Brooklyn days—… I was to be an orator—to go about the country spouting my pieces, proclaiming my faith…. I thought I had something to say—I was afraid I would get no chance to say it through books: so I was to lecture and get myself delivered that way.”19 According to his brother George, at the peak of the lyceum craze, in the early fifties, “He wrote what his mother called ‘barrels’ of lectures.” Although just one lecture (his March 31, 1851 address to the Brooklyn Art Union) has survived, both his notebooks and his poetry of the 1850s are filled with references to oratory. His conception of the national poet’s role was related to his devotion to oratory. In his notebook he jotted this free-form reflection: “American Lectures/New sermons/America-Readings—Voices Walt Whitman’s Voices.”20 The great advantage of lecturing, he saw, was direct contact with the people.

  When Whitman sketched out in a notebook his own lecturing plans, he told himself to maintain verve without wildness, passion without excess. He wanted, he wrote, to develop a lecture style that was “far more direct, close, animated and fuller of live tissue and muscle than any hitherto.” But he warned himself: “Be bold! be bold! be bold! Be not too bold! With all this life and on the proper emergency, vehemence, care is needed not to run into any melodramatic, Methodist Preacher, half-inebriated, political spouter, splurging modes of oratory.”21 He recoiled from undisciplined orators. As he put it, “Not hurried gabble, as the usual American speeches, lectures, &c. are, but with much breath, such precision, such indescribable meaning, slow and with interior emphasis.” What was needed, then, was breadth, strength, interiority.

  Actually, he was ill-equipped to be a great orator, with a voice that had range and expression but did not project well to large crowds. It was in his poetry that he presented the kind of oratorical style he had in mind. Writing for him was closely allied to speaking. One reason his poetry sounds oratorical is its air of spontaneity, of being spoken aloud. His method of composition was spontaneous. Suddenly seized with an impression or image, he would scribble it quickly on any handy scrap of paper, trying, as he explained, “to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment—to put things down without deliberation.”22 He kept separate scraps in an envelope, later bringing them together as poems after careful revision. He was never far from what he called vocalism. Of his poems he told Traubel, “I like to read them in a palpable voice: I try my poems that way—always have: read them aloud to myself.”

  An unsuccessful orator himself, he nonetheless gained vicarious satisfaction in experiencing the effect of that the most powerful American speakers had on their hearers:

  O the orator’s joys!

  To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the ribs and throat,

  To make people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,

  To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue.23

  Critics have shown that the poems of the first three editions of Leaves of Grass are characterized by oratorical devices such as exclamations, rhetorical questions, negations, parallelism, invocations to a “you.”24 This style made some fastidious commentators uncomfortable. Rossetti, for example, found in his verse outbursts “fitted for a Yankee stump orator, but forbidden to a poet.”25 For Whitman, however, oratorical technique was a culturally accepted mode of making contact with the American public. Whitman changed the participatorial lecture style into a new participatory poetics. If the performers and speakers he admired challenged boundaries between themselves and their hearers, he tried to demolish such boundaries altogether. He coaxed, badgered, seduced the reader, reaching, as it were, right through the page.

  His theory of poetry was by definition participatory and agonistic. “The reader
will always have his or her part to do,” he wrote, “just as much as I have mine.”26 Reading he called “a gymnast’s struggle” in which the reader grapples with the author.27 Absorbed into poetry, the antebellum personal style erased the boundary between performer and listener, between writer and reader:

  Camerado, this is no book,

  Who touches this touches a man.

  Surveying all the entertainment experiences of his young manhood, Whitman wrote, “Perhaps my dearest amusement reminiscences are those musical ones.”28 Music was such an all-pervasive force on him that he saw himself less as a poet than as a singer or bard. “My younger life,” he recalled in old age, “was so saturated with the emotions, raptures, up-lifts of such musical experiences that it would be surprising indeed if all my future work had not been colored by them.”29

  Among the titles of his poems seventy-two different musical terms appear. In the poems themselves twenty-five musical instruments are mentioned, including the violin, the piano, the banjo, the oboe, and the drums. One poem, “Proud Music of the Storm,” sings praise to virtually all kinds of music, popular and classical, even mentioning by name specific operas and symphonies.

  The dominant musical image group in his poetry derives from vocal music. As was true with his response to theater and oratory, he was stirred especially by what he called “the great, overwhelming, touching human voice—its throbbing, flowing, pulsing qualities.” Of the 206 musical words in his poems, 123 relate specifically to vocal music, and some are used many times. “Song” appears 154 times, “sing” 117, “singing” and “singers” more than 30 times each.30

  Whitman regarded music as a prime agent for unity and uplift in a nation whose tendencies to fragmentation and political corruption he saw clearly. Music offered a meeting place of aesthetics and egalitarianism. For all the downward tendencies he perceived among contemporary Americans, he took confidence in the shared love of music. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass he mentioned specifically “their delight in music, the sure symptoms of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul.”31 Music allowed for sensuous release and emotional expression without the scabrousness and windy excess he saw elsewhere in popular culture. As he explained in an 1855 magazine article: “A taste for music, when widely distributed among a people, is one of the surest indications of their moral purity, amiability, and refinement. It promotes sociality, represses the grosser manifestations of the passions, and substitutes in their place all that is beautiful and artistic.”32 By becoming himself a “bard” singing poetic “songs” he hoped to tap the potential for aesthetic appreciation he saw in Americans’ positive responses to their shared musical culture.

  Whitman’s poetic yoking of images from various cultural levels—his alternation between aria motifs and minstrel-show antics, for instance, or his combinations of high diction and slang—was reflective of the varied performance culture that surrounded him.

  What Whitman especially prized was music that sprang from indigenous soil and embodied the idioms and concerns of average Americans. He discovered such music in the family singers and minstrel troupes that attained immense popularity in the mid-1840s. In a series of newspaper articles written from 1845 to 1847 Whitman rejoiced over what he saw as the distinctly American qualities of the new family singers, especially the Hutchinsons. The most popular family group before the Civil War, the Hutchinson singers consisted of three brothers—Judson, John, Asa—and their younger sister Abby, part of a talented family of thirteen boys and girls from Milford, New Hampshire. Their catchy songs ran the gamut of popular idioms, from the sentimental to the sensational, and promoted a variety of reforms, particularly temperance and antislavery. In a newspaper article titled “American Music, New and True!” (which he revised four times!) he argued that the “art music” of the foreign musicians was overly elaborate and fundamentally aristocratic, while the “heart music” of the American families was natural and democratic. Whitman wrote of the American family singers: “Simple, fresh, and beautiful, we hope no spirit of imitation will ever induce them to engraft any ‘foreign airs’ upon their ‘native graces.’ We want this sort of starting point from which to mould something new and true in American music.”33

  As an American “singer,” Whitman in his poetry would strive for naturalness and what he called “a perfectly transparent, plate-glassy style, artless,” characterized by “clearness, simplicity, no twistified or foggy sentences.”34 It was this kind of artlessness he saw in the Hutchinsons, whose “elegant simplicity in manner” he praised.35

  He was powerfully stirred by the rich vocal mixtures of the singing famlies, such as the Hutchinsons’ alternation between solo and group parts. He paid homage to such mixtures in his poem “That Music Always Round Me”:

  [N]ow the chorus I hear and am elated, […]

  I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings,

  I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;

  I do not think the performers know themselves—but now I think I begin to know them.36

  Another form of American music that appealed to Whitman was the minstrel song. Particularly intriguing is the possible relationship between Whitman and the leading minstrel songwriter, Stephen Foster. Whitman commented that songs like Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” were “our best work so far” in native music.37 The first American to earn a living from songwriting, Foster first gained wide popular success in 1847 with “Oh! Susanna,” followed in the next five years with “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Old Dog Tray,” and many others.

  With the rise of Stephen Foster, American music became popular and participatory in an unprecedented way. In the days before such passive entertainments as radio and television, people would hear melodies and sing them constantly aloud to themselves, creating, as it were, their own musical programs. Whitman himself did this. Often when alone he sang popular ballads or martial songs in a low undertone, and while sauntering he hummed snatches of popular songs or operas. An East River ferryboat worker said that when passengers were few Whitman liked to regale them with “pleasant scraps and airs” in his “round, manly voice.”38

  It was Foster’s music that sprang most naturally from American’s lips in the early 1850s. Says the music historian Charles Hamm of Foster’s impact: “Never before, and rarely since, did any music come so close to being a shared experience for so many Americans.”39

  There was ample justification, then, for Whitman’s confidence that music was commonly loved and even performed by many Americans. The lines he wrote to express music’s near-universal presence in American daily life was a kind of poetic gloss on the newspaper reports of the day: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, / Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong”—and so forth, as he goes on to describe the singing of the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker, the wood-cutter, the wife, all “singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.”40

  Responsive to the simple, egalitarian music of the singing families and the minstrels, Whitman was also inspired by a more sophisticated form, the opera.

  He admired the great opera singers who came to America in the 1840s and ’50s. He heard at least sixteen of the major singers who made their New York debuts in the next eight years, including the Italian baritone Cesare Badiali, the tenor Allesandro Bettini, the sopranos Giula Grisi and Balbina Steffanone, the contralto Marietta Alboni, and the English soprano Anna De La Grange.

  Among the male singers, the ones he most admired were Badiali and Bettini. The large, broad-chested Badiali, who first appeared in New York in 1850, Whitman called “the superbest of all the superb baritones in my time—in my singing years.”41 Bettini, especially as the male lead in Donizetti’s La Favorita, made it clear to him that art music need not be distinct from heart music. It was almost certainly Bettini to whom he paid tribute in this passag
e in “Song of Myself”: “A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me, / The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.”42 Another tenor he heard in the early fifties, Pasquale Bignole, remained so vivid a memory that upon Bignole’s death in 1884 he wrote a eulogistic poem, “The Dead Tenor,” reviewing by name his major operatic roles and recreating the effect of his singing:

  How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee!

  (So firm—so liquid-soft—again that tremulous, manly timbre! The perfect singing voice—deepest of all to me the lesson—trial and test of all).43

  Among all the opera stars, the one that shone brightest for him was Marietta Alboni, the great contralto who also sang soprano roles. “For me,” he told Traubel, “out of the whole list of stage deities of that period, no one meant so much to me as Alboni, as [Junius Brutus] Booth: narrowing it further, I should say Alboni alone.”44 A short, plump woman with a low forehead and black hair, Alboni had been coached in Italy by Rossini and, after several European tours, arrived in New York in the summer of 1852. Her opening on a sweltering June 23 at Metropolitan Hall was a complete triumph. “There was never a more successful concert,” raved the next day’s Herald.45 Between that summer and the next spring in Manhattan she appeared in ten operas and gave twelve concerts of operatic selections. She also toured other cities and states. Whitman later wrote that he heard her “every time she sang in New York and vicinity.”46 “She used to sweep me away as with whirlwinds,” he said.47